on the Future: Enclaves, Development, and Poverty Alleviation in Kearrin Sims

Abstract Following the extraordinary wealth generation of in Macau and , governments and non-state actors across Asia have developed gambling establishments as a means of fast-tracking economic growth and stimulating national development. Yet, here and elsewhere, casinos have been heavily criticized for their association with immoral behaviour, problem gambling, corruption, and organized crime. In this article, I focus on two casinos in northern Laos to address two research questions. First, I consider how casinos have come to exist within the remote border regions of one of Asia’s least developed countries. I discuss vice economies within the Golden Triangle region, multi-actor aspirations to boost transnational connectivity within continental Southeast Asia, strengthening political-economic relationships between Laos and , and Government of Laos efforts to use foreign investment as a mechanism for increasing governance capacities in borderlands. Following this, I critically analyze the relationship between casinos and development in Laos. I focus specifically on the multifarious effects of casinos on the lives and livelihoods of local communities to argue that casino development has been informed by logics of expulsion and the establishment of new predatory formations. To make this argument, the article draws on four fieldwork visits to each of the casino sites between 2011 and 2015, desk- based research, and interviews with local residents, casino staff, and members of the Government of Laos.

Keywords: Laos, casinos, expulsion, Chinese , special economic zone, Greater Subregion DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5509/2017904675

Introduction ince Macau first liberalized its casino industry in 2002, there has been a rapid expansion of gambling establishments within Southeast Asia. SIn , more than fifty casinos are currently operating, in the ______Kearrin Sims is a lecturer in Development Studies at James Cook University, Cairns, . He is also an adjunct research fellow with Western Sydney University’s Humanitarian and Development Research Initiative (HADRI). Email: [email protected]

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Philippines billions of dollars are being spent on integrated casino resorts, and in Laos, , , Singapore, and , casinos have become increasingly prominent components of burgeoning intraregional tourism markets.1 In short, casinos are now a notable feature of the region’s political economy. As evidenced in the work of Warren, Southeast Asia’s contemporary gaming sector builds on a long history of commercial gambling.2 Yet, as Zhang and Yeoh have argued, the current phase of casino gambling appears to be intimately associated with neoliberal capitalism’s “insatiable drive for geographical expansion and economic interconnection.”3 As new aggregations of leisure, tourism, employment, and consumption, casinos have become dynamic sites of global connectivity that have produced new governance arrangements and partnerships between the state and private sector, and generated new movements of people, commodities, and capital.4 Following the massive financial revenues generated by Macau’s and Singapore’s gaming sectors, casinos have also been increasingly perceived by state and private actors as remarkable assets for stimulating economic growth and development. In 2013, Macau’s thirty-five casinos produced gaming revenues seven times greater than the entire Las Vegas strip. At US$45 billion, such revenues have allowed for massive investment in social services and public infrastructures that have assisted the small self-administrating region’s 600,000 residents in attaining the world’s fourth-highest life expectancy and GDP per capita indices.5 Singapore’s two casino resorts, the Marina Bay Sands and Resorts World Sentosa, also recorded combined 2013 profits exceeding the Las Vegas strip, and have played a pivotal role in the

______1 Erin Lin, “The Socio-economic Impact of Border Casinos in Rural Cambodia,” paper presented at Beyond the State’s Reach: Casino Spaces as Enclaves of Development or Lawlessness?, IIAS Workshop, Phnom Penh, Cambodia, 21–23 August 2015; Muhammad Cohen, “Amid Philippine Transition, Ghost of Presidencies Past Rises In Razon Casino Plan,” Forbes Asia, 14 May 2016, accessed 1 June 2016, http://www.forbes.com/sites/muhammadcohen/2016/05/14/amid-philippine-transition-ghost-of -presidencies-past-rises-in-razon-casino-plan/#4bacb1e979ec. 2 James Warren, Gambling, the State and Society in , c. 1800-1945 (New York: Routledge, 2013). 3 Juan Zhang and Brenda S.A. Yeoh, “Harnessing Exception: Mobilities, Credibility, and the Casino,” Environment and Planning A 48, no. 6 (2016): 1065, doi: 10.1177/0308518X15609175. 4 Zheng Gu, “Macau Gaming: Copying the Las Vegas Style or Creating a Macau Model?” Asia Pacific Journal of Tourism Research 9, no. 1 (2004): 89–96; Joan Henderson, “Betting on Casino Tourism in Asia: Singapore’s Integrated Resorts,” Tourism Review International 10, no. 3 (2006): 169–179; Sytze F. Kingma, ed., Global Gambling: Cultural Perspectives on Gambling Organizations (New York: Routledge, 2010); Zhang and Yeoh, “Harnessing Exception.” 5 Tim Simpson, “Non-State Actors, Informal Networks, and Resurgent Medievalism in Macau’s Casino Industry,” paper presented at Beyond the State’s Reach: Casino Spaces as Enclaves of Development or Lawlessness?, IIAS Workshop, Phnom Penh, Cambodia, 21–23 August 2015, 16–17; Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), “The World Factbook: Macau” (2016), accessed 1 June 2016, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/mc.html.

676 Casino Enclaves and Development in Laos country’s rejuvenation as a “must-see” luxury destination of highly ordered investment and consumption.6 Yet, in Southeast Asia and elsewhere, casinos have also been heavily criticized for their association with immoral behaviour, gambling addiction, corruption, and organized crime.7 In the United States, Grinols has demonstrated links between the gaming sector, suicide, and bankruptcy, while in Myanmar and Cambodia Nyíri and Sripana, respectively, have reported casino-related violence and predatory money lending.8 Concerning Macau, Zandonai has argued that casino industries have undermined the livelihoods of small and medium enterprises, Sheng and Tsui have suggested that an uneven distribution of casino wealth has caused “serious social division,” and Hing has demonstrated a relationship between casino gambling, money laundering, and criminal violence.9 Consequently, whether or not casinos are beneficial or destructive to national socio-economic development and community well-being remains the subject of much debate. In this article, I explore the complex political-economic entanglements surrounding two casinos in northern Laos. In a country where more than 70 percent of the population are agriculturalists and the vast majority of foreign investment has been directed towards natural resource extraction, casinos have been championed as new mechanisms for development that will boost foreign investment, increase state revenues, offer new employment opportunities, and bring urbanization and public infrastructures to remote border regions.10 However, of the two casinos to operate in the country’s north, one has been closed following media reports of kidnapping, assault, and murder, and the other has faced criticism in the international media

______6 Zhang and Yeoh, “Harnessing Exception,” 1072. 7 Gu, “Macau Gaming”; Chan Yuk Wah, “Fortune or Misfortune? Border Tourism and Borderland Gambling in Vietnam,” in Asian Tourism Growth and Change, ed. Janet Cochrane (Oxford: Elsevier, 2008), 145–156; Li Sheng and Yanming Tsui, “Casino Booms and Local Politics: The City of Macau,” Cities 26, no. 2 (2009): 67–73; Davis K.C. Fong, Hoc Nang Fong, and Shao Zhi Li, “The Social Cost of Gambling in Macao: Before and After the Liberalisation of the Gaming Industry,” International Gambling Studies 11, no. 1 (2011): 43–56; William Vlcek, “Taking Other People’s Money: Development and the Political economy of Asian Casinos,” The Pacific Review 28, no. 3 (2015): 323–345; Sheyla Zandonai, “Gambling and the Colonization of Space: Enclaves, Sprawling and Contrasted Spaces in Macau,” paper presented at Beyond the State’s Reach: Casino Spaces as Enclaves of Development or Lawlessness?, IIAS Workshop, Phnom Penh, Cambodia, 21–23 August 2015. 8 Earl Grinols, Gambling in America: Costs and Benefits (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Pál Nyíri, “Enclaves of Improvement: Sovereignty and Developmentalism in the Special Zones of the China-Lao Borderlands,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 54, no. 3 (2012); Thanyathip Sripana, “Casinos and Threat to Social Stability,” paper presented at Beyond the State’s Reach: Casino Spaces as Enclaves of Development or Lawlessness?, IIAS Workshop, Phnom Penh, Cambodia, 21–23 August 2015. 9 Lo Shiu Hing, “Casino Politics, Organized Crime and the Post-colonial State in Macau,” Journal of Contemporary China 14, no. 43 (2005): 207–224; Sheng and Tsui, “Casino Booms,” 68; Zandonai, “Gambling and the Colonization of Space.” 10 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), “The World Factbook: Laos,” (2016), accessed 1 June 2016, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ch.html.

677 Pacific Affairs: Volume 90, No. 4 – December 2017 for its alleged association with narcotics syndicates, illegal wildlife trading, and other criminal activities. At both establishments residents have been forcibly displaced from their land, gambling debts have negatively affected families and communities, and already vulnerable communities have faced new forms of marginalization, disadvantage, and exclusion.11 By critically analyzing the multifarious effects of casinos on the lives and livelihoods of local communities alongside the primary development agendas and actors that have framed these establishments as mechanisms for poverty alleviation, this article questions the relationship between casinos and “development” in Laos. Here, I draw on the work of Sassen to argue that casinos represent new predatory formations which privilege elite interests over the needs of the impoverished and have driven the acute concentration of state and private-sector wealth.12 As I have demonstrated elsewhere, such top-down, technocratic, and growth-focused development is not a new phenomenon in Laos.13 However, what marks casino development as different from other growth-focused projects is the explicit association with violence, crime, familial bankruptcy, species loss, displacement, and other manifestations of expulsion and exclusion. Such exceptional qualities demand focused, context-specific analysis. To conduct this analysis, the article draws on four fieldwork visits to each of the casino sites between 2011 and 2015. In 2011, I undertook three visits of between four and seven days to each of the casinos (and proximate urban centres) with the support of a local intermediary who facilitated fieldwork interviews. A period of approximately three months intersected each of these visits. I also made three unaccompanied, single-day visits to each casino site during 2011. In August 2015 I embarked on a further month of in-country fieldwork in Laos, including single-day visits to each of the casino sites. Fieldwork included participant and non-participant observation, a mixture of unstructured and semi-structured interviews, review of in-country development policy documents and other cultural artefacts, as well as the collection of a research library of photographic images, video footage, and

______11 Tom Fawthrop, “Laos’s Chinese Gamble,” The Diplomat, 24 December 2010, accessed 1 June 2016, http://thediplomat.com/2010/12/laoss-chinese-gamble/; Ron Gluckman, “Bungle in the Jungle,” Forbes Asia Magazine, 27 July 2011, accessed 1 June 2016, http://www.forbes.com/ global/2011/0808/companies-laos-china-economy-gambling-gangsters-bungle-jungle.html; Danielle Tan, “Small is Beautiful: Lessons from Laos for the Study of Chinese Overseas,” Journal of Current Chinese Affairs 41, no. 2 (2012): 61–94. 12 Saskia Sassen, Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014). 13 B. Howe and K. Sims, “Human Security and Development in the Lao PDR: Freedom from Fear and Freedom from Want,” Asian Survey 51, no. 2 (2011): 333–355; K. Sims, “The Asian Development Bank and the production of poverty: Neoliberalism, technocratic modernization and land dispossession in the Greater Mekong Subregion,” Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 36, no. 1 (2015): 112–126; K. Sims, “Culture, community-oriented learning and the post-2015 development agenda: A View from Laos,” Third World Quarterly 36, no. 10 (2015): 1922–1943.

678 Casino Enclaves and Development in Laos field notes. Interviews were conducted with proximate residents to each casino, casino employees, and relevant members of the Government of Laos. In total, ninety-two interviews were conducted during fieldwork, of which fifteen focused specifically on casino development.

Connecting Land-locked and Least Developed Laos to the Mekong Subregion According to many macroscale development indicators, recent decades have seen considerable socio-economic progress in Laos. While still one of the poorest countries in Southeast Asia, since 2006 an average annual economic growth rate of 7.9 percent has made the country one of the ten fastest growing economies in the world.14 During that same period, foreign direct investment (FDI) grew dramatically, gross national income doubled, and the official poverty rate decreased from 33.5 percent to around 23 percent.15 Consequently, in 2010 the UNDP labelled Laos the sixth most successful country for human development in the past forty years.16 However, such macroscale indicators do not capture the full complexity of socio-economic transitions. As I and numerous others have argued elsewhere, the term “development” means different things to different people and is often invoked in a manner that privileges state and donor priorities over the needs and perspectives of the poor.17 In Laos, prevailing approaches to development have remained committed to technocratic growth-first agendas that present economic markets as naturally efficient and impartial, and which prioritize economic growth, infrastructure development, and the economization of natural environments over social welfare and the redistribution of resources. Much aid and investment has been channelled towards projects that have threatened community livelihoods and expelled poor and vulnerable groups from their lands, homes, and income-generating activities.18 A prime motivator for much of the past decade’s contestations over access to land and other resources has been a nation-wide push to promote foreign

______14 CIA, “The World Factbook: Laos.” 15 World Bank, 2016, Lao PDR, http://data.worldbank.org/country/lao-pdr, accessed 2 March 2017. 16 “UNDP Ranks Laos among World’s Top 10 Movers,” Vientiane Times, 15 November 2010, B1. 17 Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); James Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine: ‘Development’, Depoliticization and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho (London: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-politics, Modernity (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2002); Tanya Murray Li, The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 18 B. Howe and K. Sims, “Human Security and Development in the Lao PDR”; K. Sims, “The Asian Development Bank and the production of poverty.”

679 Pacific Affairs: Volume 90, No. 4 – December 2017 investment and increase transnational connectivity. According to prevailing development ideologies, Laos’ highly mountainous and land-locked geography has restricted foreign investment, hampered international trade, and slowed industrial modernization.19 As such, the government and many of its aid partners have undertaken numerous measures to promote transnational connectivity, including upgrades to transport and telecommunication infrastructures, trade deregulation, the “softening” of national borders, and the allocation of vast land concessions to foreign investors. Yet, as Andriesse, Barney, and Cohen have all argued, the pursuit of transnational connectivity within Laos has often been motivated by a form of “frontier neo-liberalism” or “frontier capitalism” that is producing “new patterns of marginalization and livelihood insecurity for a vulnerable rural population.”20 The leading regional economic integration programme in Laos today is the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS). Formulated in 1992 on the suggestion of the Asian Development Bank (ADB), the GMS is an economically driven region that incorporates Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam, and China’s Yunnan Province and Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. At the heart of GMS connectivity is its “economic corridor” programme, which involves the expansion and upgrading of three transnational highways (two of which pass through Laos) to promote trade, investment, and tourism, and develop new networks and clusters of industry.21 In Laos and elsewhere, the expansion of road networks and other connective infrastructures is a national priority deemed pivotal to supporting inclusive growth and poverty reduction. Yet, while road upgrades and expansion have undeniably contributed to economic growth across multiple scales, a number of studies have also detailed the detrimental impacts of road development—including, but not limited to—rising inequality, heightened tensions between ethnic minority groups, land grabbing, enhanced competition over natural resources, decreased food security, environmental degradation, and increased exposure to communicable diseases.22 Perhaps most concerning of all for the government, it has also

______19 Government of Laos (GoL), 7th National Socio-Economic Development Plan (2011-2015), (Vientiane: Ministry of Planning and Investment, 2011); Asian Development Bank (ADB), Greater Mekong Subregion: Twenty Years of Partnership (Manila: ADB, 2012). 20 Edo Andriesse, “Laos: A State Coordinated Frontier Economy,” International Institute of Social Studies, working paper no. 522 (2011), 4; Keith Barney, “Laos and the Making of a Relational Resource Frontier,” The Geographical Journal 175, no. 2 (2009): 146–159; Paul T. Cohen, “The Post-Opium Scenario and Rubber in Northern Laos: Alternative Western and Chinese Models of Development,” International Journal of Drug Policy 20, no. 5 (2009): 424–430. 21 Danielle Tan, “The Greater Mekong Subregion Programme: Reflections for a Renewed Paradigm of Regionalism,” Asia Europe Journal 12, no. 4 (2014): 383–99. 22 ADB, Build It and They Will Come Lessons from the Northern Economic Corridor, Mitigating HIV and Other Diseases (Manila: ADB, 2009); James R. Chamberlain and UNDP South East Asia HIV and

680 Casino Enclaves and Development in Laos been convincingly demonstrated that more than twenty years of interstate agreements and aid-funded infrastructure investment has not shifted Laos’ position as a minor party in GMS trade networks.23 As Mr. Sengsavang Phandanouvong, director of the Division of Transport Techniques and Environment in the Ministry of Public Works and Transport states:

These roads [transnational highways] are only being used by trucks from Thailand, China and Vietnam, who are also damaging them … . Laos is still not a production or export country—it is only an import country … . We are only becoming a transit country.24

As detailed in Laos’ seventh National Socio-Economic Development Plan, the government has established special economic zones (SEZs) as a means of addressing marginalization from regional and global trade networks.25 To date, ten SEZs have been approved for operation in Laos and have already generated more than US$1 billion in investment from 105 firms.26 During the next ten years the government aspires to have twenty-five SEZs in operation, key components in its broader strategy to promote foreign investment and manufacturing, boost employment, transition from a landlocked to a “landlinked” country, establish new tourism markets, and overcome both aid dependency and its least developed country status.27 Casinos have proved to be by far the most lucrative of SEZ investments for both the government and private investors.

The Contested Landscapes of SEZs As networks of global capitalism have become increasingly concentrated within a system of key corridors and nodes, SEZs have become common

______Development Project, HIV Vulnerability and Population Mobility in the Northern Provinces of the ’s Democratic Republic (Bangkok: South East Asia HIV and Development Project, 2000); Serge Doussantousse, Bounchanh Sakounnavong, and Ian Patterson, “An Expanding Sexual Economy Along National Route 3 in Luang Namtha Province, Lao PDR,” Culture, Health & Sexuality (2011), 1–13; Melody Kemp, Roads to Destruction: ADB’s Contradictory Roads, Biodiversity and Plantations Activities in the Lao PDR or How Did You Know We Wanted Ecocide? (: NGO Forum on ADB, 2011); Peter Warr, “How Road Improvement Reduces Poverty: The Case of Laos,” Agricultural Economics 39, no. 3, (2008): 269–279. 23 Jim Glassman, Bounding the Mekong: The Asian Development Bank, China, and Thailand (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2010). 24 Author’s personal communication with Sengsavang Phandanouvong, director of the Division of Transport Techniques and Environment in the Ministry of Public Works and Transport, 9 February 2012, Vientiane. 25 Government of Laos, 7th National Socio-Economic Development Plan, 209. 26 NCSEZ, Presentation By vice Minister Bouatha on SEZ: 17 March 2015 (Vientiane: SNCSEZ, 2015), PowerPoint presentation in author’s possession; NCSEZ, SEZ Development in Lao PDR. 27 Secretariat of the Lao National Committee for Special Economic Zones (NCSEZ), SEZ Development in Lao PDR (Vientiane: SNCSEZ, 2012).

681 Pacific Affairs: Volume 90, No. 4 – December 2017 instruments for drawing foreign investment.28 This is particularly so within emerging economies, where many states have successfully used the “variegated sovereignty” that such “exceptional” zoning technologies afford to stimulate rapid economic growth, form new middle classes, encourage urbanization, and establish new connections with global capital.29 For states experimenting with neoliberal governance, SEZs provide an ideal mechanism for “the selective application of market-oriented governance regimes” on targeted populations and places.30 Indeed, for many states and development planners SEZs represent “the creation city par excellence”: a space where the fantasy of frictionless economic flows can “perform optimally with minimal government interference.”31 As both “spatially delimited experiments with extreme levels of liberalization” and “places of imagination and aspiration in which people construct and assemble possible future worlds,” SEZs continue to be widely conceptualized as “isolated and autonomous arena[s] for market activity” that are “free from the frictions of politics and culture.”32 Such “modernist fantasy,” as Cross describes it, is primarily driven by state aspirations for national economic growth and industrial capitalists’ fantasies of “personal enrichment.” However, SEZs also frequently invoke landscapes of hope and aspiration amongst proximate communities.33 This is not to suggest such aspirations are always, or even often, realized. As the work of numerous scholars demonstrates, SEZs have frequently become highly contested spaces where “different sectors of the population” are “subjected to different technologies of regulation” that endow individuals “with very different kinds of rights, caring, and protection.”34 In Laos and elsewhere, SEZs have resulted in agricultural livelihoods being “materially

______28 Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Blackwell Publishing, 2000); Neil Brenner, New State Spaces: Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). 29 Ong, “Neoliberalism as Exception”; Aiwha Ong, “Scales of Exception: Experiments with Knowledge and Sheer Life in Tropical Southeast Asia,” Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 29, no. 2 (2008): 117–129; Jonathan Bach, “Modernity and the Urban Imagination in Economic Zones,” Theory, Culture and Society 28 (2011), 100. 30 Jamie Cross, “The Economy of Anticipation: Hope, Infrastructure, and Economic Zones in South ,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 35, no. 3 (2015): 427. 31 Bach, “Modernity and the Urban,” 107. 32 Michael Levien, “Special Economic Zones and Accumulation by Dispossession in India,” Journal of Agrarian Change 11, no. 4 (2011): 454; Cross, “The Economy of Anticipation,” 424–425. 33 Cross, “The Economy of Anticipation,” 426. 34 Bach, “Modernity and the Urban”; Cross, “The Economy of Anticipation”; Jonathan Xavier Inda, “Analytics of the Modern: An Introduction,” in Anthropologies of Modernity: Foucault, Governmentality, and Life Politics, ed. Jonathan Xavier Inda (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 13; Levien, “Special Economic Zones”; Michael Levien, “Regimes of Dispossession: From Steel Towns to Special Economic Zones,” Development and Change 44 (2013): 381–407; Ong, “Neoliberalism as Exception”; Tan, “Small is Beautiful.”

682 Casino Enclaves and Development in Laos affected by policies that privilege urban industries,” while zone employees have been frequently subjected to repressive laws, abuse, and the denial of the most basic social protections and inalienable legal rights.35 As Ong succinctly states, in many cases SEZs have seen elites “showered with every economic, social, and political benefit, while others are abandoned and deprived of sustenance to survive.”36 Such abandonment and deprivation of sustenance to survive is nowhere more evident than in the numerous large-scale land acquisitions and forced resettlements that have accompanied SEZ developments across Asia.37 While marketed as projects of poverty alleviation and development, it has been repeatedly demonstrated that one of the foremost objectives of many SEZ projects is to enable states to “indiscriminately transfer land from peasants to capitalist firms for real estate.”38 Driven by “extra-economic process[es] of coercive expropriation” that are “exercised by states to help capitalists overcome barriers to accumulation,” SEZs have often required large-scale forced resettlement programs. These in turn have undermined the food security and livelihoods of vulnerable rural populations, and dispossessed already impoverished communities of their “common social wealth.”39 It is as a consequence of such dispossession and livelihood decimation that I have come to frame Laos’ casino SEZs as predatory formations targeted at facilitating corporate interests over the needs of local residents. At play in these contested spaces are what Sassen describes as “new logics of expulsion,” whereby the complexities of state and private-sector aspirations for wealth have commingled to produce “elementary brutalities” and “reinvented mechanisms for primitive accumulation.”40 Such brutalities go beyond the generation of new forms of inequality. Rather, what is taking place is the very expulsion of residents from their existing “life projects and livelihoods.”41 Indeed, I argue that Laos’ northern casinos present a powerful example of the “not yet fully visible and recognisable” shifts in advanced capitalism which Sassen has so eloquently demonstrated are expanding from what she calls the “systemic edge” to become more generalizing extremes.42

______35 Cross, “The Economy of Anticipation,” 427, 429; Naomi Klein, No Logo (Great Britain: Flamingo, 2000); Levien, “Special Economic Zones”; Ong, “Neoliberalism as Exception,” 79. 36 Aihwa Ong, “Graduated Sovereignty in South-East Asia, in Anthropologies of Modernity: Foucault, Governmentality, and Life Politics, ed. Jonathan Xavier Inda (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 93–94. 37 Bach, “Modernity and the Urban”; Cross, “The Economy of Anticipation”; Levien, “Special Economic Zones.” 38 Levien, “Regimes of Dispossession,” 381. 39 Cross, “The Economy of Anticipation,” 434; Levien, “Special Economic Zones,” 468. 40 Sassen, Expulsions, 2, 12, 29. 41 Sassen, Expulsions, 1, 3. 42 Sassen, Expulsions.

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Betting on Casinos to Drive Development During the past decade three casinos have been built within SEZs in Laos. The first to begin operation was the Royal Jinlun hotel (and casino) complex, which formed the centrepiece of the sixteen-square-kilometre “Golden Boten City” SEZ, on the Laos-China border of Luang Namtha Province. Opened in 2007 by the Hong Kong-registered Fok Hing Company, the Royal Jinlun casino was once part of a booming border town that drew in thousands of Chinese tourists daily. Chinese migrants set up shops selling lingerie, pornography, sex toys, mobile phones, and various other commodities; a number of restaurants, karaoke bars, and massage parlours were also opened. By mid-2010, Golden Boten City (GBC) had received US$130 million of investment for the construction of three large hotels, a nightclub, high-rise apartment blocks, public infrastructures, and a number of small commercial shops and restaurants.43 However, as will be discussed later in more detail, in 2011 the Royal Jinlun casino was closed following reports of violence (including murder) against Chinese gamblers. Since then, investors have withdrawn their

Figure 1 Golden Boten City

Source: Author

______43 Nyíri, “Enclaves of Improvement”; Danielle Tan, “Chinese Engagement in Laos: Past, Present, and Uncertainty,” Trends in Southeast Asia 7 (2015): 1–32.

684 Casino Enclaves and Development in Laos

Figure 2 Golden Boten City

Source: Author funding, buildings under construction have been left unfinished, and once- manicured gardens have been replaced with overgrown grass and the wrecks of numerous vehicles (see figures 1 and 2).44 Described by Nyíri as “a sprawl of throwaway construction already showing its age just two years after opening,” and by Gluckman as a “grand scheme” that “went spectacularly wrong,” GBC never amounted to anything more than a transitory enclave of vice economies for Chinese tourists.45 The second, and still operating, casino in northern Laos is that of the Hong Kong-registered “Kings Romans Group.” Located approximately fifty- five kilometres north of Bokeo Province’s capital of Houay Xai, in close proximity to the borders of Thailand and Myanmar, Kings Romans casino is part of the 10,000-hectare “Golden Triangle” SEZ, which currently incorporates five hotels, a nightclub, a “Chinatown” shopping arcade, a fresh produce market, dormitories for casino employees, housing for displaced residents (discussed below), a hospital, a school, and more than sixty hectares of agricultural crops—particularly bananas.46 Also commencing operations in 2007, the Golden Triangle SEZ is the largest economic zone in Laos and by 2014 had received over US$644 million of investment—more than half the total US$1.05 billion that has been spent across all the country’s SEZs.47 Should state and investor aspirations for the Golden Triangle SEZ be realized,

______44 Nyíri, “Enclaves of Improvement”; Tan, “Small is Beautiful.” 45 Pal Nyíri, “The Chinese concession: Golden Boten City,” MqVu Wordpress (blog), 11 December 2012, accessed 16 September 2016, http://mqvu.wordpress.com/2008/12/11/the-chinese-concession -golden-boten-city/; Gluckman, “Bungle in the Jungle.” 46 Nyíri, “Enclaves of Improvement”; Tan, “Small is Beautiful.” 47 NCSEZ, SEZ Development in Lao PDR.

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Figure 3 Kings Romans Casino

Source: Author more than US$2 billion of investment will eventually transform this zone into a modern city of commercial buildings, an airport, and perhaps even a motor racing stadium.48 Designed by a Portuguese architect who also designed casinos in Macau, Kings Romans’ decorative golden crown and surrounding statues of Athenian gods present a simulacrum of wealth and aristocracy that appears strikingly out-of-place in a landscape of rice fields, banana plantations, and thatched houses (see figure 3).49 As in many of Macau’s casinos, the atmosphere at Kings Romans primarily targets VIP gambling, and inside the casino’s ornately decorated entrance, two large central gaming halls are flanked by multiple VIP rooms, including a Ukrainian-operated online gambling room. High rollers send paid representatives to bet on their behalf while communicating through audio headsets and in nearby marketplaces casino chips can now be used as a form of currency to purchase everything from cosmetics to vegetables. Finally, one important distinction between the now-closed Golden Boten City and the Kings Romans SEZ (and casino) is that, at the latter, the Government of Laos maintains a 20 percent ownership stake.50

______48 Thein Swe and Paul Chambers, Cashing in Across the Golden Triangle: Thailand’s Northern Border Trade with China, Laos, and Myanmar (Chiang Mai: Mekong Press, 2011), 111; Tan, “Small is Beautiful.” 49 Nyíri, “Enclaves of Improvement,” 540. 50 Tan, “Chinese Engagement,” 21.

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The final casino to be opened within Laos’ SEZs is the SavanVegas casino of the Savan-Seno SEZ, located in the southern province of Savannakhet. Also funded by Macau-based investors, SavanVegas was closed by the government in 2012 on the basis of claims that its operators, Sanum Investments Ltd., owed US$23 million in unpaid taxes and penalties. This accusation was quickly followed by Sanum Investments Ltd. filing an arbitration case against the government at the World Bank’s International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes.51 However, while the closure of this casino raises important questions around the government’s ability to successfully govern casinos, due to time and access constraints experienced during field research this casino is not discussed at length in this article.

Particularities of Place: China, the State, and Borderland Elites The use of SEZs and other forms of “‘exceptionalist logics of neoliberal reasoning” to enact the exceptional forms of power that are often required to enable casino economies has not been unique to Laos.52 On the contrary, such “exception making” has been a common means through which Southeast Asian states have accommodated and encouraged casino-led growth. As Zhang and Yeoh note, “mega casino resorts are often seen as a particular space of neoliberal exception where political and ethical exceptions are made in favour of market forces and capital growth.”53 However, it would be a mistake to regard northern Laos’ casinos as solely the product of the expanding logics of neoliberal capitalism or an increasingly ubiquitous Southeast Asian casino economy. Rather, these complex aggregations are deeply embedded within the political and socio-economic landscapes in which they are situated. In the remainder of this section I describe the three most pertinent factors that have led to the formation of casinos in northern Laos, as well as the discursive framing of these establishments as exceptional drivers of modernization and development. The first, and perhaps most significant, place-specific trait is the region’s close proximity to China. Casino gambling is illegal in Mainland China and, with the World Tourism Organisation estimating that China will have 100 million outbound tourists by 2020, casinos have become one of the central means through which Southeast Asian countries seek to capitalize on China’s

______51 “Lao Holdings and Sanum: International Tribunal Prevents Laos Government from Seizing Investor’s Property,” Business Wire, 14 October 2013, accessed 1 June 2016, http://www.businesswire. com/news/home/20131013005053/en. 52 Zhang and Yeoh, “Harnessing Exception,” 1065. 53 Zhang and Yeoh, “Harnessing Exception,” 1070.

687 Pacific Affairs: Volume 90, No. 4 – December 2017 growing presence within the region.54 This is particularly so for Laos, which shares a national boundary with China and has received a steady inflow of Chinese tourists over recent years. Indeed, between 2013 and 2014 Chinese tourism to Laos increased by 72 percent, reaching 422,440 arrivals.55 China is now Laos’ largest provider of FDI, its fourth-largest provider of bilateral aid, and the most important builder of roads, bridges, dams, and other infrastructure.56 For more than a decade trade between China and Laos has also risen at an annual rate of 25 percent and from the late 1990s onwards this trade has been accompanied by a stark increase in the number of Chinese migrants. Such flows have radically transformed northern Laos’ political economy and encouraged new tourism markets that break away from the generally small-scale ethnic-minority focused “eco-tourism” that has been popular amongst Western backpackers.57 At the centre of such tourism has been the construction of Chinese-funded entertainment facilities and new built environments. This is nowhere more evident than at the two northern casino sites, where telephone networks have come from China, security vehicles and street signs display Chinese characters, the Renminbi is the preferred currency, and the vast majority of consumer items are Chinese imports. The chairman of Kings Romans casino, Zhao Wei, and the former director of Golden Boten City, Huang Minxuan, are both Chinese-born Hong Kong citizens and for many years Golden Boten City was located before the (since relocated) Lao border checkpoint. Indeed, given the scale of Chinese investment, migration, and tourism entering Laos’ northern SEZs, international media has commonly referred to these sites as Chinese enclaves in Lao territory.58 While media coverage has had a tendency to overstate the significance of China’s presence in Laos,59 it is clear that flows of people, money, and ideas

______54 Ng Beoy Kui, “The Economic Emergence of China: Strategic Policy Implications for Southeast Asia,” in Connecting and Distancing: China and Southeast Asia, ed. Ho Khai Leong (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2009), 187–210; Tak-Wing Ngo, “Asian Casinos in the Age of Casino Capitalism” (paper presented at Beyond the State’s Reach: Casino Spaces as Enclaves of Development or Lawlessness?, IIAS Workshop, Phnom Penh, Cambodia, 21–23 August 2015). 55 Lao National Tourism Administration (LNTA), 2014 Statistical Report on Tourism in Laos (Vientiane: LNTA 2014), 8. 56 Leeber Leebuapao and Saykham Voladet, “Impacts of China on Poverty Reduction in Laos,” in Assessing China’s Impact on Poverty in the Greater Mekong Subregion, ed. Hossein Jalilian (Singapore: ISEAS Publishing, 2013), 385–428, 414; Nyíri, “Enclaves of Improvement.” 57 Tan, “Small is Beautiful,” 71; Leebuapao and Voladet, “Impacts of China”; David Harrison and Steven Schipani, “Lao Tourism and Poverty-alleviation: Community-Based Tourism and the Private Sector,” Current Issues in Tourism 10, nos. 2 and 3 (2008): 194–230; David Harrison and Steven Schipani, “Tourism in the Lao People’s Democratic Republic,” in Tourism in Southeast Asia: Challenges and New Directions, eds. Michael Hitchcock, Victor T. King, and Mike Parnwell (Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2009), 165–188. 58 Fawthrop, “Laos’s Chinese Gamble”; Gluckman, “Bungle in the Jungle.” 59 Gluckman, “Bungle in the Jungle”; Fawthrop, “Laos’s Chinese Gamble.”

688 Casino Enclaves and Development in Laos from China are reshaping development policy and practice. Indeed, as Nyíri and Tan have argued at length, Laos’ northern casino towns represent powerful examples of the high-modernist and technocratic development frameworks that the Chinese state and private sector have pursued widely across the Global South.60 This is an “intensely comparative and competitive” development agenda that privileges the expansion of infrastructure, urbanization, and public-private partnerships, and which perceives Laos as a place of “backward” peoples and ideas.61 While many “Chinese” investments (including the casinos) are not explicitly linked to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Chinese aid-funded upgrades to roads and other transport infrastructures have driven the flow of entrepreneurs, migrants, and tourists on which these projects depend. In fact, both Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and private firms represent major stakeholders in the CCP’s development cooperation, which has been widely critiqued for its “blurring and bundling” of aid and private-sector investment in a manner that is not consistent with Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Development Assistance Committee (DAC) guidelines.62 As Chinese companies and SOEs have become increasingly prolific across the Global South, the CCP has often advocated for land concessions and the creation of SEZs as a means to stimulate economic growth and development. Economic zones have played a central role in China’s economic and industrial growth from the 1980s onwards and, having witnessed the economic opportunities that such spaces of “exception” can provide, the CCP has taken a “leading role” in promoting SEZ development throughout the Global South.63 As Lyttleton and Nyíri note, while the concessionary model of development is not uniquely Chinese, there is “an assertiveness and enthusiasm” for the use of concessions and SEZs that is “peculiar” to Chinese projects.64 This is particularly so in Laos, where SEZs have been “specifically associated with China”—to the extent that the same Chinese planning firm that designed the Shenzhen SEZ executed “the master plan for the Golden Triangle SEZ.”65

______60 Nyíri, “Enclaves of Improvement”; Danielle Tan, “Small is Beautiful.” 61 Pal Nyíri, “The Yellow Man’s Burden: Chinese Migrants on a Civilizing Mission,” The China Journal 56 (2006): 83–106. 62 Marcus Power, “Angola 2025: The Future of the World’s Richest Poor Country as Seen Through a Chinese Rear-View Mirror,” Antipode 44, no. 3 (2012): 993–1014, 994; Giles Mohan, “Beyond the Enclave: Towards a Critical Political Economy of China and Africa,” Development and Change 44, no. 6 (2013): 1255–1272. 63 Deborah Bräutigam and Tang Xiaoyang, “Economic Statecraft in China’s New Overseas Special Economic Zones: Soft Power, Business, or Resource Security?” International Affairs 88, no. 4 (2012): 799–816; Chris Lyttleton and Pal Nyíri, “Dams, Casinos and Concessions: Chinese Megaprojects in Laos and Cambodia,” in Engineering Earth: The Impacts of Megaengineering Projects, ed. Stanley D. Brunn (Lexington: Springer, 2011), 1243–1265. 64 Lyttleton and Nyíri, “Dams, Casinos and Concessions,” 1255. 65 Nyíri, “Enclaves of Improvement,” 540, 554.

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That said, it is important to stress here that while the CCP has supported SEZ development in Laos, it has also been one of the most outspoken critics of casinos. Indeed, the closure of Golden Boten City and its casino was enacted by the government on the behest of the Chinese state, which also placed restrictions on border passes from China to Laos and ordered the three Chinese telephone companies servicing the SEZ to cut their services.66 Consequently, while China’s economic growth and tourism outflows have been central to the expansion of casinos in Laos, these establishments should not be perceived as constitutive of some form of neocolonial expansion, but rather as the product of a more diffuse outpouring of people and capital from China in which the CCP, SOEs, private firms, entrepreneurs, labour migrants, and tourists are drawn together through a shared desire for modernization, development, and wealth accumulation.67 The second key, country-specific determinant that has legitimized the usage of casinos as an enabler of development in northern Laos has been state aspirations to further governance controls within peripheral border regions, to stimulate economic growth, and to “better engage and compete in the global economy.”68 As previously noted, from the late 1980s onwards a leading development objective of the government has been to increase global connectivity by transforming Laos from a “landlocked” to a “land-linked” country. In a context where state revenues are limited, the government has sought to achieve this objective by two means: providing land concessions to foreign investors and establishing public-private partnerships for the construction of infrastructure and new built environments. Such partnerships have been central to SEZ development, where, as Tan elaborates, ongoing processes of privatization “should not be read as a withdrawal of the Lao state in economic affairs,” but as a deliberate application of graduated sovereignty that is designed to further consolidate state power.69 In particular, the casino and SEZ development nexus has become one of the central mechanisms through which the government has sought to expand its influence over ethnic minority communities. Positioned within the country’s ethnically diverse mountainous periphery—a region which James Scott suggests has historically accommodated communities resistant to nation-state governance—Laos’ casinos are surrounded by peoples long perceived by the state to be both insufficient economic producers and consumers, and a potential source of political instability.70 Traditionally living

______66 Nyíri, “Enclaves of Improvement,” 538; Tan, “Small is Beautiful,” 80–81. 67 Lyttleton and Nyíri, “Dams, Casinos and Concessions,” 1255. 68 Tan, “Small is Beautiful,” 84. 69 Tan, “Small is Beautiful,” 84; Tan “Chinese Engagement,” 19. 70 Ian G. Baird, “Turning Land into Capital, Turning People into Labour: Primitive Accumulation and the Arrival of Large-Scale Economic Land Concessions in the Lao People’s Democratic Republic,”

690 Casino Enclaves and Development in Laos in small, close-knit villages scattered across the mountains, these once semi-nomadic communities often practice (illegal) swidden farming and opium cultivation, speak languages other than Lao, and engage in cultural practices that the government deems “backwards,” such as polygamy and animal sacrifice. In a context where other forms of investment have been lacking, the government has taken advantage of casinos as a means to encourage forms of “‘distance-demolishing technologies,” such as roads, telephone lines, electricity, and airports, that can enable the political integration and economic monetization of “the people, lands, and resources of the periphery.”71 The third place-specific factor that has been crucial to the formation of casinos in northern Laos is the complex political networks, economies, and transnational mobilities of the Golden Triangle region. While it is beyond the scope of this article to provide a detailed analysis of such complex entanglements, it is important to stress that Laos’ casinos are embedded within a mosaic of historical and contemporaneous processes and patterns of Chinese tourism and migration, power contestations and armed insurgencies between local elites and state governance structures, transnational organized crime networks, as well as ongoing efforts by the international development sector to enhance transnational connectivity and create new opportunities for economic growth.72 Of particular concern for the security of those living in close proximity to the casinos, as well as the safety of visiting tourists, are the claims by multiple journalists that both Laos’ northern casinos have seen significant investment flows from borderland narcotics elites.73 At the centre of such claims is U Sai Lin, a former member of China’s Red Guards and now a “drug lord” who commands a militia of between 2,000 and 3,000 soldiers.74 Drawing income from a range of activities including logging, opium economies, and the establishment of a number of gambling houses in Myanmar, U Sai Lin and other casino investors have increasingly sought to position themselves as “regional modernizers” and “spearheads” of Lao national policy for alleviating rural poverty in the borderlands.75 As Nyíri elaborates, in the face of increasing state territorializing, borderland elites have sought to “hedge against encroachment” from centralized states by “joining legitimate

______News Proposals: Journal of Marxism and Interdisciplinary Inquiry 5, no. 1 (2011): 10–26; James Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), xii, 4–5, 253. 71 Scott, “The Art of Not Being Governed”, xii, 4–5, 253. 72 For more on this issue see Nyíri, “Enclaves of Improvement.” 73 Fawthrop, “Laos’s Chinese Gamble”; Gluckman, “Bungle in the Jungle”; Bertil Lintner and Michael Black, Merchants of Madness: The Methamphetamine Explosion in the Golden Triangle (Bangkok; Silkworm Books, 2009). 74 Tan, “Small is Beautiful,” 83. 75 Tan, “Small is Beautiful,” 85.

691 Pacific Affairs: Volume 90, No. 4 – December 2017 international circuits,” “linking up with global and regional economic opportunities,” and embracing “developmentalist discourse” as a means to valourize personal profit-seeking activities.76 Thus while the casino operators deny any links to narcotics economies— and in fact frame casino resorts as alternatives to such economies—the investment channels supporting these projects, and the privileged opportunities that such establishments offer for money laundering, make such claims spurious. Rather than replacing narcotics economies, casino enclaves have instead provided an additional form of income for narcotics elites, as well as new tourism flows to consume the other illicit activities they control. As demonstrated in the works of Walker, Nyíri, Sturgeon, Diana, Tan, and others, such complex historical and contemporary entanglements and manoeuvring between the state and non-state elites in Laos’ northern borderlands is not unique to the present period.77 In fact, while Laos’ casinos have only emerged within the last decade, it is important to stress that gambling establishments have been an important component of the Golden Triangle’s socio-economic landscape from the late 1980s onwards. What is significant about Laos’ current casino establishments, however, is the conceptual repositioning of these sites as beacons of national development.78

The Localized Impacts of Northern Laos’ Casinos Casinos and the SEZs in which they are situated have brought rapid foreign investment and urbanization to Laos’ most peripheral landscapes. They have assisted the government in expanding state governance and increasing state revenues, generated economic growth and tourism flows, and provided funding for the construction of roads and other public infrastructures. For local elites, casinos have provided a lucrative alternative (or additional income) to opium economies and an opportunity to represent their personal wealth accumulation as aligned with development and poverty alleviation. In regard to local residents, casinos and their surrounding service industries have brought new business and employment opportunities, skills training, and new commodity flows.79 Wages at both casinos have been higher than almost all other forms of available employment and, for some, have resulted in increased levels of household income and consumption.80 ______76 Nyíri, “Enclaves of Improvement,” 545. 77 Antonella Diana, “The Experimental Governing of Mobility and Trade on the China-Laos Frontier: The Tai Lue Case,” Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 34, no. 1 (2013): 25–39; Nyíri, “Enclaves of Improvement”; Janet C. Sturgeon, “Cross-border Rubber Cultivation between China and Laos: Regionalization by Akha and Tai rubber farmers,” Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 34, no. 1 (2013): 70–85; Andrew Walker, The Legend of the Golden Boat: Regulation, Trade and Traders in the Borderlands of Laos, Thailand, China, and Burma (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1999). 78 Tan, “Small is Beautiful,” 85. 79 Nyíri, “Enclaves of Improvement,” 536. 80 Lin, “The Socio-economic Impact,” 4.

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While not often acknowledged in state-centric readings of development, these sites have also provided a host of new employment opportunities for wage-labourers and small-scale entrepreneurs from neighbouring countries such as Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia, and China. At the Kings Romans casino, a large slum settlement hosting some 3,500 Burmese migrants exemplifies the range of employment opportunities that have resulted from casino tourism. A small number of these migrants are offered educational opportunities through a (single classroom) Mandarin- and English-language “school” funded by the casino and, although the presence of these migrants has caused some tension with local residents, new friendships and relationships have also been formed.81 However, alongside these achievements, casino development has also been accompanied by growing socio-economic inequality, worker exploitation, socially destabilizing gambling debt, violent crime, vice economies, and the forced resettlement of subsistence farming communities. At both the now largely abandoned Golden Boten City SEZ and the still operating Kings Romans SEZ, the majority of employment opportunities are only available to those who can speak Mandarin. Indeed, according to the latest government figures, of the 6347 people currently working in the Golden Triangle SEZ, just 208 are Lao citizens, while at Golden Boten City’s peak success Nyíri noted a “clear subordination and near-invisibility of Lao workers.”82 Jobs available to local residents have generally been the lowest paid and most difficult, leading Tan and Swe and Chambers to respectively suggest that “the main winners” and the “main beneficiaries” of the northern region’s rapid socio-economic transformation have been “Chinese investors and petty traders” or “state-backed Lao, Chinese (Yunnanese), Thai, and Myanmar businesspersons.”83 For many local residents, casinos have not enabled greater global connectivity or inclusive growth, but instead have ushered in the formation of new economies that have expelled the residents from the lands and resources they once occupied.84 Loss of land, deforestation, and the pollution of natural environments have constrained the diversified livelihood practices of upland communities and driven many individuals into precarious forms of labour such as prostitution.85 While casino operators have provided new housing for displaced communities, many are unhappy with the relocation process and

______81 As of August 2015, the casino-funded school employed just one teacher, who was also meant to work the casino floor and to teach English and Mandarin to casino staff. Future funding for the school remained uncertain and it was unclear who would continue the program if the single (migrant) casino staff member were to leave. 82 Nyíri, “Enclaves of Improvement,” 537. 83 Tan, “Small is Beautiful,” 71; Swe and Chambers, “Cashing in,” 88. 84 Gluckman, “Bungle in the Jungle.” 85 S. Sengdara, “Waste from Boten Daenkham Zone in Need of Treatment,” Vientiane Times, 2 April 2010.

693 Pacific Affairs: Volume 90, No. 4 – December 2017 in both instances residents have made claims of insufficient compensation.86 In particular, the destruction of a historic Buddhist temple that was too fragile to be relocated has been the source of significant emotional stress for many local residents, an issue that has not been acknowledged in economistic readings of SEZ success. Put simply, casino SEZs have maximized profit through the state-sanctioned violent upheaval of land and natural resources. The casinos are yet another example of Hall et al.’s “visions of development and modernity” as a discursive tool for legitimizing state and private-sector land acquisitions within the Mekong region, or what Lyttleton and Nyíri have described as “orchestrated land management under the guise of international development.”87 Furthermore, while casino operators have stressed their non-affiliation with organized crime, rumours of gambling-related violence are common amongst local residents, who tell stories of people being unlawfully detained, bodies being dumped in rivers, and thievery as a means of supporting a gambling addiction:

The casino is no good. People can win some money there but mostly they lose everything. They [patrons] see all this money and think they will be rich. But I am worried these people will steal from us.88

My friend is a police officer [at the SEZ] and he told me that a Chinese woman with unpaid debts was found hanging [by her wrists] in the forest about 10km from the casino… . She needed medical treatment in Houay Xai for three days before she could return to China.89

Such claims are difficult to verify; however, many media articles have also offered similar reports of gambling-related violence, including the aforementioned Chinese television programs that prompted the forced closure of the Golden Boten City SEZ.90 Prostitution and the sale of endangered wildlife are openly engaged in within close proximity to both casino sites, and at the Golden Triangle SEZ a 2015 investigation by the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) found that “products including tigers, leopards, elephants, rhinos, pangolins, helmeted hornbills, snakes and bears” were readily available for consumption.91 According to a (dissenting) senior casino employee, tigers in the SEZ “zoo” are available

______86 Nyíri, “Enclaves of Improvement”; Tan, “Small is Beautiful.” 87 Derek Hall, Phil Hirsch, and Tanya Murray Li, Powers of exclusion: Land dilemmas in Southeast Asia (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2011), 196; Lyttleton and Nyíri, “Dams, Casinos,” 1243. 88 Author’s personal communication with anonymous interviewee, 4 December 2011, Houay Xai. 89 Author’s personal communication with anonymous interviewee, 2 December 2011, Houay Xai. 90 Fawthrop, “Laos’s Chinese Gamble”; Gluckman, “Bungle in the Jungle.” 91 Environmental Investment Agency (EIA), Sin City. Illegal Wildlife Trade in Laos’ Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone (Washington, DC: EIA [US], 2015), 2, accessed 15 September 2016, https:// eia-international.org/wp-content/uploads/EIA-Sin-City-FINAL-med-res.pdf.

694 Casino Enclaves and Development in Laos for VIPs to purchase, with much of the wildlife available for consumption illegally smuggled into Laos from Myanmar, alongside gemstones and—so suggest unconfirmed local rumours—narcotics and trafficked women for prostitution.92 Finally, Tan’s analysis of casino financing suggests investment from U Sai Lin, a man widely believed to lead one of Myanmar’s largest methamphetamine networks. This is further evidence that northern Laos’ casinos are intimately tied to the Golden Triangle’s US$16 billion narcotics economy.93 Perhaps the greatest social cost of casino economies, however, has been the loss of wealth and assets through gambling debt. Unlike Macau and Singapore, Laos has no public awareness campaigns or support programs for gambling addiction. Lao nationals are legally prohibited from gambling at the country’s casinos; however, such legislation has been weakly enforced and at the Kings Romans casino, patrons wearing the rubber sandals and loose-fitting clothing of subsistence farmers and wage labourers are a commonplace sight. Significantly, according to local residents, money lenders operating at the Kings Romans casino will even offer financial loans in exchange for personal assets. As one informant states:

Together we [himself and his brother-in-law] have lost more than US$100,000. I used to have three cars but I was forced to sell two of them. I have also sold my house and US$25,000 of rubber trees. If you lose all your money you can give them [lenders at the casino] the keys to your car and they will give you [up to] 300,000 Thai baht (US$9330). But you will have to pay back 330,000.94

This man, and father of six children, was once a wealthy farmer of teak, corn, rice, and rubber. However, over a twelve-month period he gambled the majority of his family’s wealth and severely strained his relationship with his spouse.

I am not sure how I can make this money back. One friend of mine has already committed suicide because of the money he lost at the casino.95

It must be stressed here that the financial losses experienced through gambling debt have not been limited to individual families. Rather, suicides, imprisonment, and the aforementioned casino-related violence have negatively affected entire communities. When trying to locate the above informant on my return to the casino in 2015, for example, family members

______92 Author’s personal communication with anonymous interviewee, 15 August 2015, Tongpeun. 93 Tan, “Small is Beautiful”; Tan, “Chinese Engagement”; United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Southeast Asia Opium Survey: Lao PDR, Myanmar (Bangkok: UNODC, 2014). 94 Author’s personal communication with anonymous informant, 1 December 2011, Houay Xai. 95 Author’s personal communication with anonymous informant, 1 December 2011, Houay Xai.

695 Pacific Affairs: Volume 90, No. 4 – December 2017 informed me that he was currently incarcerated in Myanmar for the alleged trafficking of methamphetamines. While it is not clear whether this individual was already engaged in such activities before he began gambling at the casino, his stated uncertainty regarding how to recover his financial losses suggests gambling debts may be pushing vulnerable people into illicit economies. Here, it is important to emphasize that Laos’ casinos operate in a country widely considered to be led by one of the world’s most politically repressive and corrupt governments.96 In fact, according to Tan, one of the motivating factors behind the establishment of casinos in Laos has been to provide the country’s leadership with “an ideal framework to cover all sorts of illicit and illegal activities,” and to “launder illicit money into legal channels” under the guise of development and poverty alleviation.97 While Tan also suggests that the government’s 20-percent ownership stake in the Kings Romans casino demonstrates it has learned from the governance mistakes made at Golden Boten City, in such a repressive political context it remains to be seen whether enhanced state involvement will increase the welfare of local residents. Acts of protest against forced resettlement in the Golden Triangle SEZ have already been met with armed resistance by the Lao state and the majority of policing conducted within the SEZ is undertaken by a casino-funded private security force whose impartiality as an agent of law enforcement remains questionable. Finally, while the Golden Triangle SEZ has produced far greater state remittances than any other economic zone in Laos, a source inside the casino revealed that, due to a number of factors, it is unlikely that the government will be receiving the agreed-upon 20 percent allocation of profits. These factors include, but are not limited to, insufficient methods to evaluate how this figure is to be calculated, a failure to manage the implementation of taxes on casino employees, questionable reporting of casino profits by investors, and limited government human resource capacities to monitor casino operations.98 As Malaykham Sayakone, once acting director of the International Relations and Cooperation Division of the NCSEZ Secretariat Office, states:

Lack of experience in managing SEZs has been a big problem for us. Tourism SEZs have been suspended at this time until they can be reformed. No more casinos will be built in future SEZs at this stage … both the Luang Namtha and Bokeo casinos were built before the SEZ office was formed in 2010.99

______96 Transparency International, “Laos” (2016), accessed 1 June 2016, http://index.rsf.org/#!/ index-details/LAO; Freedom House, “Laos” (2016), accessed 1 June 2016, https://freedomhouse. org/country/laos. 97 Tan, “Chinese Engagement,” 24. 98 Author’s personal communication, 15 August 2015, Tongpeun. 99 Author’s personal communication with Malaykham Sayakone, 17 January 2012, Vientiane.

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This failure of the Laos government to successfully govern and address the prolific presence of illicit activities within the casino SEZs has both threatened the viability of these sites to promote other forms of investment, and harmed the country’s international reputation with its aid and diplomatic partners. As the aforementioned report by the EIA notes, for example, the government’s partial ownership of the Kings Romans casino makes it a complicit partner in what has become a major regional hotspot for the trafficking of endangered wildlife.100

Conclusion The recent expansion of casinos within Southeast Asia is an important phenomenon that demands further academic analysis. In this article, I examine two casinos in northern Laos to address two central questions. First, I explain how these particular establishments have come to exist within a remote and mountainous part of one of Southeast Asia’s most impoverished countries and, following this, I assess how, and for whom, casinos have brought “development” to Laos. In regard to my first question, I demonstrate that the country’s casinos have emerged both from a combination of state and private-sector aspirations to replicate the exceptional wealth generation created by casinos in Macau and Singapore, and a variety of place-specific historical and contemporary forces. Of particular importance here has been China’s growing presence in Laos; attempts by the Lao state to expand its governance powers within border regions and promote regional connectivity within continental Southeast Asia; and the aspirations of Golden Triangle narcotics elites to maintain and expand their wealth within a rapidly transforming political- economic landscape. To reiterate, as has been common to much of Southeast Asia’s casino economies, Laos’ northern casinos are intimately tied to the growth of Chinese tourism and investment flows throughout the region. Yet, as I emphasize, the forms in which such flows have materialized in northern Laos—and the development implications of these flows for local communities—are shaped by place-based specificities that are particular to this context. In respect to my second question, I note that Southeast Asia’s casinos have proven to be highly productive drivers of economic growth. They have stimulated foreign investment, increased state revenues, boosted employment, and generated new tourism markets. Such growth offers spill- over effects that, when correctly managed, can provide significant improvements to livelihoods and well-being. In the context of northern Laos, I have argued that the form of “development” casinos seek to perpetuate is grounded within a top-down

______100 EIA, Sin City, 2.

697 Pacific Affairs: Volume 90, No. 4 – December 2017 and technocratic framework that has brought considerable national economic growth and elite wealth accumulation, but which is also largely inconsiderate of the lives and livelihoods of the impoverished. While casinos have provided some new employment opportunities, encouraged national economic growth, and driven infrastructural modernization, they have also resulted in growing socio-spatial inequalities, worker exploitation, and the large-scale forced displacement of low-income communities. Drawing together state aspirations for modernization and economic growth with private- sector aspirations for profit maximization, these casino SEZs represent the “new phase of advanced capitalism” described by Sassen, in which “a mix of elites and systemic capacities” produce new “predatory formations” that generate acute wealth concentration through public-private investment partnerships, the granting of land and other concessions through SEZ zoning technologies, and the expulsion of marginalized and vulnerable communities.101 Here, local residents are not simply “missing out” on the benefits of economic growth, they are being harmed by it. Consequently, while Laos’ casinos may eventually prove to be long-term drivers of economic growth and infrastructural development, I suggest that these establishments are also a telling example of what both Sassen and Mohan have described as a wider turn in the global economy towards the increasing prevalence of dispossession and expulsion as “the norm for many in the developing world.”102 Here, I refer to both the acquisition of land and to more abstract forms of dispossession such as the dispossession of family wealth through extractive gambling, the dispossession of species through trading in endangered wildlife, and the dispossession of life and community well-being through casino-related violence and suicide. As Vlcek similarly notes in his writings on Macau and Singapore, “rather than producing goods and services to be traded with other jurisdictions as the means for increasing the overall mutual wealth of the trading partners, the policy [of casino gambling] is to provide a service that directly strips the non-citizen of wealth.”103 I do not mean to suggest that the government is being disingenuous in its claims that casinos offer mechanisms for the stimulation of development, nor do I entirely reject the possibility that the Kings Romans casino may eventually fulfil state and investor aspirations and produce a modern new urban environment in Laos’ northern periphery. The 2013 completion of the fourth Laos-Thailand friendship bridge from Houay Xai to Thailand is expected to enhance traffic flows to the SEZ and, if completed, so too will a planned high-speed railway between China and Singapore. Indeed, at

______101 Sassen, Expulsions, 13. 102 Giles Mohan, “Beyond the Enclave: Towards a Critical Political Economy of China and Africa,” Development and Change 44, no. 6 (2013): 1255–1272, 1259; Sassen, “Expulsions.” 103 Vlcek, “Taking Other People’s Money,” 323, 337.

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US$6.92 million, the Golden Triangle SEZ has produced far greater state remittances than any other SEZ in Laos. However, it remains clear that the development agenda which informs the government’s support of casinos adopts a top-down and technocratic understanding of development that depoliticizes and erases local particularity, subjects all aspects of life to “the rationality espoused by development economists,” and has led many residents of the northern uplands to experience “increasing marginalization under deepening regional capitalism.”104 Privileging state-building modernization programs, national economic growth, and elite wealth accumulation over the livelihoods and well-being of local communities, northern Laos’ casino SEZs are exemplary specimens of an increasingly prominent approach to development in Laos and elsewhere which legitimizes state and private-sector wealth accumulation as unanimously serving the public needs, but which, at times, actually directly disadvantages poor and vulnerable groups.

James Cook University, Cairns, Australia, May 2017

______104 Arturo Escobar, “Discourse and power in development: Michel Foucault and the Relevance of his Work to the Third World,” Alternatives 10, no. 3 (1984/85): 377–400, 388; Janet C. Sturgeon et al., “Enclosing Ethnic Minorities and Forests in the Golden Economic Quadrangle,” Development and Change 44, no. 1 (2013): 53–79, 53.

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